Xah Lee <xah@xahlee.org> wrote:
+---------------
| does anyone know what lang Dijkstra had in mind in the following quote?
|
| "Another lesson we should have learned from the recent past is that
| the development of 'richer' or 'more powerful' programming languages
| was a mistake in the sense that these baroque monstrosities, these
| conglomerations of idiosyncrasies, are really unmanageable, both
| mechanically and mentally. I see a great future for very systematic and
| very modest programming languages." -- E W Dijkstra (1972)
+---------------
Probably PL/I. In his classic little rant "How Do We Tell Truths
that Might Hurt" [EWD498, 1975] he calls PL/I "the fatal disease".
(FORTRAN, by comparison, gets off light, called only "the infantile
disorder".)
-Rob
p.s. In the same essay he also slams BASIC, COBOL, APL, and
perhaps, obliquely, Ada [though it is not clear that by June 1975
the HOLWG had made enough progress yet for much useful criticism]...
-----
Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org>
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